


Fire And Ice (One-Shot)

by LeafyGreenQueen773



Series: Starker Week 2018 [2]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Alcoholic Tony Stark, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Genius Peter Parker, M/M, Starker, Starker Week 2018, Teen Peter Parker, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 16:47:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15247581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeafyGreenQueen773/pseuds/LeafyGreenQueen773
Summary: AU (soulmates) where when someone writes on his or her skin, the same thing shows up on their soulmate in the same place as a Mark that fades away in a few hours.Tony Stark was thirty-one when he got his first Marks.  When he realized his soulmate was a child, he resolved to never try to find out who it was or meet them.  No matter how many times his soulmate desperately tried to reach out to him.For Starker Week 2018 (Day 2).





	Fire And Ice (One-Shot)

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Огонь и лед](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15272601) by [SpiritHallows](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpiritHallows/pseuds/SpiritHallows)



Tony remembered exactly where he’d been when he’d felt the first burn of a soulmate Mark.

He’d been out to dinner with his fling at the time -- an inconsequential reporter, when everything was said and done, although she was pretty enough -- and they’d just lifted their champagne glasses to toast what was promising to be a night of decent fucking before passing out on his Egyptian cotton sheets and then sending her on her merry way at dawn.  Just as Tony was about to cling his flute against the reporter’s, a sharp sting started on his forearm and seared its way up to his wrist. He’d never felt a Mark before, and the pain surprised him enough that he let his flute fall to the table. It shattered, propelling glass and alcohol everywhere.

“God, sorry, I’m sorry,” Tony said hastily, and he half-stood to flag down a waiter.  “Could we get this cleaned up? Thank you.”

The reporter had seemed concerned enough.  “Are you all right?”

Tony was clutching his left forearm, he knew, and was too distracted to really answer.  Without another word, he left the table, paid on the way out, and got in a cab. He rarely took cabs, but at the moment, he didn’t care.

He remembered peeling back the fabric of his suit coat and dress shirt to see what had been written on his skin.  Most people got their first Marks early in life, while they were children still. He’d been waiting for thirty-one years, occasionally scrawling on his own skin with a pen, hoping that there’d be a response eventually.  Part of him thought that maybe he didn’t have a soulmate.

But the chicken scratch on his arm proved otherwise, even if it didn’t tell him anything about his alleged partner, except maybe that they were illiterate.

That had been nearly eighteen years ago.

These days, Tony spent precious little time communicating with the person on the other end of the connection.  Most people found their soulmates easily -- one of them would write an address, or a name, and the Internet would do the rest.  They’d meet, they’d fall in love, and that was that.

For Tony, things were different.

He’d realized within days that his soulmate must be a child.  Every time the Marks burned onto his skin, they were an illegible mess.  It took a few years before they started forming into messy, blocky letters.  For about a week once, when Tony was around 36, he could tell that the kid was trying to write their own name on his body, for practice.  He got a shaky letter “P,” what looked like a wonky “E” and then the rest was pretty much shit. After a week, the name-writing stopped. Tony supposed the parents must have warned their child not to write their name.  Maybe the parents knew it was showing up on the body of an alcoholic, near-40 billionaire.

On Tony’s forty-first birthday, he got drunk on the couch alone, flipping through channels on the massive flat-screen television attached to the wall.  Somehow, despite all the channels that were on these days, he kept coming up with rom-com after rom-com. And somehow, despite the fact that he never remembered grabbing it, he had a pen in his hand.

“Fuck it.”

He placed the tip of the pen to his skin, somewhere on the white part of his forearm, just up from where the bluish veins stretched into his palm.   _Hi._  

It was late, of course.  Maybe too late for a kid to be awake.  Tony wondered if, by the time the kid woke up in the morning, his pitiful attempt at reaching out would be completely faded from the kid’s heretofore unMarked skin.  

He was just about to chuck the pen across the room when he felt a searing response.   _Hi._  An unsteady smiley face, drawn for good measure, he could only assume, blackened his skin next to the succinct note.

After that night, he didn’t reach out anymore.

At first, it seemed like his soulmate was offended, because the kid kept burning Tony’s skin with “Hi” and “Hey” and smiley faces every few hours, until it eventually petered out a week later and then stopped entirely for a long time.  Tony lost count of the Mark-less days after a while, until one night when he was forty-five. He was lying in bed late on a Saturday morning when he felt a burning Mark on his ankle. It turned out to be a doodle, which looked a bit like a spider.

By lunchtime, spiders dotted him nearly everywhere.  They peppered up his arms, down his legs, and across his torso.  Part of him thought maybe the kid went crazy. There was nothing he could do about it, though.  He didn’t know who his soulmate was or where they lived or even if they lived in the United States.  All he could do was watch miniature spiders form on his body until the whole army of them faded the next day.

After that, doodles appeared on his body almost daily, although they never quite reached the scale of the spider brigade.  After another year or so, the doodles gradually turned into chemical equations, reminders scrawled on his palms, and sometimes even snippets of poetry.  The handwriting that had once been blocky and imperfect refined into a scrawl.

Still, Tony didn’t respond, no matter how many times per day he felt the sweet burn of his soulmate writing on his skin.  He was nearing fifty, and his soulmate was probably still in school. It would never be appropriate to respond. It would never be right to seek out the kid and try to get to know him or her on a more intimate level.  

Somehow Tony had lost the soulmate lottery, and the same thing had happened to his soulmate.

Like always, he simply threw himself into his work instead.  He was the CEO of Stark Industries, the world’s biggest tech giant.  He had more than enough to do, had more than enough money to spend, and had more than enough people in his life to keep him occupied.  He could still even get hot reporters, when he wanted.

When Tony was forty-eight, he was lying in bed alone, trying to get to sleep, when he felt Marks stinging into existence on his chest.  They didn’t stop there; within moments, they moved down his torso and toward his lower belly, dangerously close to a place he didn’t want to think about his soulmate writing on.

The Egyptian cotton sheets pulled off him as he straightened up and clicked on the bedside table light.  In inky lines, he could make out the poetry scrawled on his skin.

_Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.  From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire._

The last few words were arranged carefully from hip to hip, arching up toward his navel in the center to avoid the sensitive parts.  Yet, it all felt sensitive. It all felt intimate.

It felt like his soulmate had written them with the kind of desperate passion that a teenager felt about every sort of love.

Tony almost wrote back.  Almost. Instead of reaching for his pen, he reached for himself, burrowing into the hot rolls of pleasure that he suddenly couldn’t contain.

The next day, the rest of the poem appeared.  On his face.

_But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate, to say that for destruction ice is also great, and would suffice._

Where the words of desire had been written with the coinciding emotion, Tony could feel the anger behind the words gouged into the skin of his cheeks, nose, and chin.

What was worse was that he knew, somewhere, a kid was angry.  Angry enough to want to shame their soulmate by Marking their face, while simultaneously shaming their own visage.  Tony stayed inside and waited for the Marks to fade away, while somewhere out there, a teenager was probably standing in the shower, waiting for the ink to drip off.

When Tony was forty-nine, another spider appeared on his skin, on the back of his hand.  Although he hadn’t thought about the significance of the spiders much since their initial appearance, it seemed strange that there was a new superhero on the scene, who swung around Queens with a spider emblem on his chest.

Then again, spiders were simply cool to draw.  Maybe the teenager, lacking affection from their soulmate, had taken to pining for the superhero.  The jealousy that it brought to him was unbidden and stupid. Of course it was better for his soulmate to love someone else.

All the same, it was hard for him to get Spider-Man (that’s what the hero was called) out of his mind.  Tony found himself staying up late, trying to develop a similar webbing substance to the one that the masked vigilante slung on every surface of the city.  He was still working on it prominently the day that a high school science class from Queens came to visit Stark Industries on a field trip.

Tony didn’t hate field trip groups, and he actually had them quite often.  Over the past few years, though, he’d grown wary of them. Their young faces reminded him that his soulmate could be one of their peers; they were innocent and wide-eyed and unruly and everything Tony didn’t want to tarnish with his age and issues.  And yet.

On this particular day, he couldn’t help but enjoy himself a little.  It was the first day he was talking about the web fluid formula to students.  He wasn’t taking credit for the invention, of course -- just showing them how it could work, if he ever figured out the same chemical structure for the fluid that Spider-Man used.  Most of the high school kids seemed engaged (albeit still wide-eyed). One boy with brown hair seemed less impressed, standing in the back, eyes cast down.

Tony felt compelled to call him out.  This was the most interesting thing Tony had worked on in years.

“You.  With the sweater.  What do you think of all this?”

The kid looked up, brown eyes confused, and glanced around at his classmates.  “Peter,” the teacher said quickly from the other side of the group, “Mr. Stark is asking you a question.”

The kid -- Peter -- opened and closed his mouth before answering.  “Uh yeah, well, obviously it’s cool. I just think you should leave it up to Spider-Man.  It seems like he’s got it all figured out.”

Tony shrugged.  “Well, yeah. But I doubt he’ll ever develop it on a mass scale or use it to its full potential.  This sort of thing has a lot of promise. And, if this Spider-Man guy makes it himself, he’s a genius.  Obviously smarter than me.”

Color rose into the boy’s cheeks, and immediately Peter’s face went toward the floor again.  

“Don’t you agree?”

Peter raised his head just enough to say three words.  “Yeah, Mr. Stark.”

The rest of the tour went off fine, except for one thing.  Tony kept watching Peter, who kept looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.  There was no reason to be drawn to the kid. Other high schoolers had hated the lab tour before, too.  But for some reason, he couldn’t bear to watch this teenager have a bad time.

He had an idea, and at the end of another hour, he circled them all back to the lab.  “Now, I never do this,” Tony said proudly, standing in front of all of them, feeling distinctly good about himself, “but today you all have the unique opportunity to look at anything in here.  All the suits, all the robots. Just don’t touch.”

About nineteen pairs of eyes lit up like it was Christmas morning -- all except Peter’s.  And when Tony gestured widely to disperse the group, nineteen kids dispersed. Except Peter.

“You’re not having a good time, kid?”

Peter looked up from under his bangs.  Tony was short, but this kid was even a little shorter.  “No, I am. Just tired, is all.”

“Don’t sleep much?”

“Busy night.”

Tony raised his hand almost aimlessly before he allowed it to come clapping down on Peter’s shoulder.  “Anything interesting here, at least?”

“Uh, yeah.  The web fluid was cool.”

“Think it’ll ever rival Spider-Man’s?”

Peter snorted.  “Not with that formula.”  Tony felt interest prickle his chest.  He’d never met somebody who was simultaneously so shy, straightforward, and clearly brilliant.  Except maybe himself.

“Listen kid, let me give you my personal email address.  I want to know some of your thoughts. On the web fluid. And my other stuff.”

One of Peter’s eyebrows was pushed up, like he’d rubbed his face and never smoothed it out again.  That eyebrow quirked at Tony’s suggestion. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.  Got a pen?”

Peter shrugged his backpack off his shoulders hastily and unzipped a pen from one of the pockets.  When he straightened up, he had the pen poised over the palm of his hand.

Tony frowned.  “Look, you better write it on a piece of paper.  I want _you_ to have my email address, not you _and_ your soulmate.”

For a moment, Peter simply stared at Tony, those brown eyes piercing.  Then he repositioned the pen over his palm again. “It doesn’t matter. My soulmate’s dead.”

Jesus.

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.  What’s the address?”

Tony breathed in and out.  “It’s _tony.stark4766626._  Gmail.”

Peter raised that messed up eyebrow again.  “That’s a lot of numbers.”

“It’s code for Iron Man.  On an old phone keypad, you know.  That used to be relevant.”

The smallest smile quirked Peter’s lips as he pressed his pen to his skin.

Like opening an old, sweet wound, a slow burn started across Tony’s left palm.  He clenched his fist, staring at Peter’s hand, staring as the letters were written there, knowing they were appearing on his own skin just the same way, in that scrawly handwriting that he’d recognize anywhere.  Because he’d had it on his body hundreds and hundreds of times.

“You okay?” Peter was looking up at him strangely.  Tony realized he was holding his own left wrist, and he dropped it quickly.

“Yeah.  I’m...I’m good.”  He patted Peter’s shoulder again with his freshly Marked palm.  “Run along now, kid.”

As Tony turned away, he caught the curious glance from the teenager, from those brown eyes.  His hand lingered a little too long, and then he pulled it away and strode out of the lab, away from the class of high school kids, away from the kid who had spent hours of his time writing and writing and writing to his soulmate, and had only ever been Marked once.

When Tony sat in bed that night, he decided to make it twice.

The pen shook in his hand, and he stared at it, as if it weighed several tons.  It was certainly mightier than the sword, in that moment. Even mightier was the question of where to write, of where to make his Mark on the boy.  He could make it easy and write on his hand, or arm. He could pen a novel on his leg. He could return the intimate poem stretching from hip to hip.

Finally, he pressed the ballpoint to the skin over his heart.  It was clumsy, writing like this, he knew, but he held the pen as steadily as possible as he dragged the ink over his chest.  He could have written a tome, but instead he managed just one single word.

_Peter._

This was all he could do.  This was his peace offering.  This was his apology for waiting eight long years to respond to all of the doodles, notes, poetry, desperation, and anger.  And yet, it was utterly cowardly, because he named his soulmate without confessing who he was himself.

Tony didn’t deserve a soulmate.  No thought had ever been so confident in his mind, no single notion had ever occupied his brain for so long without him drowning it in liquor.

And yet, he didn’t want to drown tonight.

Tony waited patiently for over an hour.  Then, he felt the response, burning in a small arch just under where he had written.

With hesitant fingers, he pulled his skin down and tucked his chin to see what, after this small admission, his soulmate had said.

There, in a shaky scrawl, burned into him for the next several hours, was Peter’s response.

_Mr. Stark._


End file.
